


We Might Be Exactly Like We Were

by rachhell



Series: south park drabble bomb [4]
Category: South Park
Genre: Drunken Confessions, Growing Up, High School Reunion, M/M, Regrets, South Park Drabble Bomb
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-29
Updated: 2017-09-29
Packaged: 2018-12-25 12:50:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12036222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rachhell/pseuds/rachhell
Summary: In an effort to avoid memories he did not want to face, Craig skipped out on Park County High's ten year reunion - until that very memory showed up, staring right into him with his wide, green eyes.my entry for the south park drabble bomb september '17: day five - change.





	We Might Be Exactly Like We Were

**Author's Note:**

> written before the airing of s21e2 so i guess it's canon-divergent? or maybe not, maybe they just grew up? you GUYS, i can't believe that creek is canon! i am absolutely beside myself with joy!  
> title is from adele's "when we were young" (i promise i didn't realize how well that song fits this story until after it was written and i was trying to think of a title)

It was purely by chance that Craig knew he came into town. Stuck at a red light on a Friday evening, en route to photograph the sweet sixteen of some rich North Park family’s brat, as the airport shuttle van was unloading its passengers at the Holiday Inn on the corner, was when Craig saw him - the first person out of the van. _Imposter,_ was Craig’s first thought. _Imposter, robot, doppelganger, pod person, cyborg, alien, what the_ fuck _, seriously? That's him?_ He was both unmistakably Tweek Tweak, and somebody else entirely, somebody Craig had never known.

Tweek returned with his hair short, purposely and neatly ruffled, looking like some Ryan Gosling wannabe with a pair of Ray-Bans hanging from the V of his shirt. His face was clean-shaven and, by all standards, perfectly neutral in expression, his posture confident, his black jeans neatly cuffed above tan leather oxfords, and his evenly-buttoned, chambray shirt wrinkle-free. When he smiled at the driver and handed him a few bills, he didn’t twitch or flinch. Something washed over Craig that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, and if it weren’t for the person behind him leaning on their horn, he wouldn’t have even thought to take his eyes off him, sickly fascinated, dying to know what prompted this and _who are you?_

Even still, he wasn’t going to the reunion.

Craig knew, before he was even asked, that he wouldn’t be attending. Nostalgia for those awkward, boring four years at Park County High always evaded him. When he was there, he couldn’t wait to leave, and once it was over, as curious as he was about what people were up to, how they’d changed - especially the man wearing Tweek’s skin who’d stepped off that shuttle - he swore he would never look back.

Instead, he was sitting in a booth at Benny's with Henrietta and Michael at one-thirty a.m. The South Park Benny's seemed to exist outside of the normal confines of space and time. He swore the same people had worked there for all of his twenty-eight years, never aging, never changing. The booths were the same, the menu never had the new items advertised on television, and when either of the three misfits sequestered in the corner booth lit up a cigarette, nobody stopped them with a scandalized gasp and citation of Colorado law. For them, this _was_ the reunion, those two goth kids turned still-goth adults, and Craig. He wasn’t like them, not really. He never wore eyeliner, or listened to Bauhaus, or quoted Lovecraft while smoking cloves. They were simply brought together by proximity in sophomore year, through art and challenge literature classes, the latter of which Craig sucked at but enrolled in at his mom’s behest, and by the general feeling of _not belonging._ Now Michael worked in a call center in North Park, and Henrietta was a stay-at-home mom with a rich husband and a blog about black lipstick, or being a goth mother, or some inanity or other that she never shut the fuck up about.

Craig thought he himself had been the same since high school. He was just Craig. Lonely, dorky, standoffish, _existing_ Craig.

His career as a photographer made him an eternal bystander to other people’s happy moments. To feed himself and keep his power on and internet running, Craig mostly shot weddings, senior pictures in front of the mountains or at Stark’s Pond, happy smiling engagement photos, and so on, and so forth. To keep his sanity, he went into the mountains, the cemeteries, parks, dirty back alleys of town, capturing wherever and whatever and whoever else caught his eye. He would post them online, display them in cafes and restaurants, sell a few here and there, but those events kept him afloat. He couldn’t stand them.

When Token and Wendy had asked him to take pictures at the reunion that Saturday, he’d lied about being booked. He instead sprawled out on his couch in boxer briefs and an old t-shirt, trying to think of nothing at all. Not of childhood friendships and first kisses. Not of unruly blond hair like silk between his fingers and tentative groping in the park after school. _Certainly_ not of strong, slender hands gripping his hips hard enough to leave marks, fogged car windows, and paragraphs of unanswered text messages blowing up his phone. He drained a six-pack and too many pulls of Jack, smoked both a bowl and half a pack of cigarettes, stared at whatever was on the television, and said, “Yeah, okay, whatever” when Henrietta suggested picking him up. Now, here he was, propped up in the booth, swilling coffee, red-eyed, drunk, not feeling half as numb as he wished.

“Part of me thinks we should’ve gone,” Henrietta drawled through a cloud of grey smoke, “Just to see what those assholes are doing.”

“Please.” Michael rolled his eyes. “That circlejerk lovefest would’ve been so…”

 _Conformist_. Nobody was going to say it, but they knew it was implied. Craig, however, almost wanted to admit he was with Henrietta on this one, _almost_ , until the diner door opened and they fucking walked in.

They were drunk, all of them, Bebe teetering on her heels and clinging to the Tweek-Imposter’s arm, Clyde and Token laughing raucously, Jimmy red-faced and leaning into his crutches more than usual. “F-f-f- faaaa...five,” he replied to the host, and of course, of _fucking_ course, he led them to the table closest to Craig’s booth.

Clyde had dragged the table right up to theirs after all their pretend-shocked hello’s. It was stupid. An interruption, a disruption. It was a stop-and-chat of meaningless small talk, with Token and Clyde humblebragging about their accomplishments, and Bebe sucking up to Henrietta about her makeup reviews and just. Stupid. Stupid _bullshit_. Craig mumbled some lie about the wedding he shot, the one that didn’t exist, turning into a huge blow-out party and that being why he was drunk as he tried and failed spectacularly at avoiding Not-Tweek’s green-gold eyes, which were the _same_ . They were piercing, wide, and looked right into you, as they always had. He wasn’t talking, like the rest of them. He was _staring,_ and Craig felt as if something in his chest had ripped apart.

“I’m going out for a cigarette,” Craig muttered, pretending that he didn’t already have a freshly lit smoke between his fingers. He wavered as he stood, and sauntered out the front door, ignoring Clyde’s laugh of “Dude, you’re already-”

South Park summers in the dead of night required a jacket, but it was either the alcohol, the embarrassment, or something else, something swirling deep in his gut and up into his throat, something humming inside of his head, that made Craig pay no regard to the way the outside air penetrated his thin hoodie as he slouched on the Benny's bench and burned through his smoke in record time. _Fuck._ He really, _really_ wished he’d gone. He wished he’d never decided he was too cool and different for his friends so long ago, and he wished he’d-

“Hey.” Craig hadn’t heard the door open, and hadn’t noticed anybody sit next to him, until Tweek was already there. “Are you…”

“I’m fine. Everything’s fine,” Craig droned. _Are you_ okay, _how is everything, blah blah blah, why are you still in South Park, Craig?_ He mentally filled in the blank, predicting how the conversation was going to proceed.

“Can I bum one?” Tweek sounded all wrong, his crisp voice too even, far too smooth, and Craig narrowed his eyes.

“Since when do you smoke?” He lit two cigarettes together in his mouth, and passed one over.

“Only sometimes, when I drink. I'm pretty fucking drunk.” Tweek leaned back onto the bench and sucked on his cigarette with half-closed eyes, one ankle crossed over his knee. Craig was staring at him from the corner of his eye, observing the way his jeans rode up at the ankle, how his hair was nearly back to its former dishevelment in his intoxicated state, how his long, thin fingers were tapping a casual rhythm upon his knee.

“Me too. You don’t sound that drunk.”

“Neither do you.”

“I never do, you should remember. You sound…” He didn’t finish. _Different._ _Weird. Sane. Wrong. Amazing._  “How’s… where is it? Minneapolis?”

“Des Moines. It’s, I don’t know, it’s nice? Like. When I moved there I thought it’d be all cornfields and shit, but it’s not, it’s… good. _So_ much better than here. Work is good.” He took another long drag. “Nothing too exciting. Claims adjustment,” he explained before he could be asked. "The acting thing, ah, it didn't really work out. But it's...I dunno. It's whatever. Things are fine."

“Good.” Craig’s mouth felt like sandpaper. “I’m...here.”

“Yeah. I know you are. Taking pictures. I’ve seen them, online. They’re really great, dude.”

All of the unanswered questions, the unspoken words of ten, _eighteen_ years ago, buzzed in the air around them so palpably, like a cloud of gnats. They sat for what felt like a very long time but was likely just minutes, stealing peripheral glances, Tweek not protesting when Craig lit him another cigarette, and then they both spoke, at once.

“Why didn’t you come?”

“What happened to you?” And that was enough for both of them to finally crack a smile, and face each other.

“You first,” said Craig.

“No,” Tweek objected, smiling and pink-cheeked, running a hand over his hair. “You first. Why didn’t you come to the reunion? I know there wasn’t a wedding.”

He exhaled. “Okay. I just….I don’t _know._ I just couldn’t.”

“Because of me, yeah?” And it was _almost_ a twitch, the near-imperceptible movement of his head. That was enough for Craig’s stomach to flip with the knowledge that he was still _there,_ it was still him underneath the yuppie clothing and hipster haircut and confident voice. It was _Tweek_ , not an imposter, and did it ever make his heart lurch.

“Yeah. Sort of.” Craig couldn’t meet his eyes anymore; he shifted his attention down to the flaking thermoplastic coating of the bench’s metal grid. “You’re... you go now, okay? You’re so…” _Beautiful,_ he thought. “You’ve really changed. What happened to you?” he repeated, weaker than he’d expected to sound.

Tweek scoffed, but it didn’t seem unkind. “What happened to _me?_ More like what happened to you. You changed a long time ago, man.”

“I know I did. Look, Tweek, I…” _I still love you, always have? I’m sorry we all stopped being friends? I’m sorry I strung you along for eight years? I’m really,_ really _sorry I fucked you on graduation night and ghosted? I never wanted it to be this way; I just fucked up? I haven’t spoken to you in ages and still think about what it would be like to have a life with you, because I am an idiot and stuck in the past?_  He thought of all the ways he could have finished it, but nothing came out except another exhale of smoke.

For a moment, it looked like Tweek was about to reach out and do… something. Take his hand, maybe, or pat him on the knee, but instead his outstretched fingers hesitated before resuming their drumming, this time on the bench. “I know,” he all but whispered back. “And, uh. I guess it was therapy.”

“What?”

“Therapy. You know, _what happened to you_.” He’d pushed his voice through his nose in a surprisingly accurate imitation of Craig’s. “Meds, all that stuff. And getting out of here, away from home. Working. Normal growing up, boring adult shit. I’m not seeing anyone. By the way,” he added, the jerking movement of his head more pronounced. “I don’t know why I told you that.”

“Because we’re drunk?” He looked up again, an aching half smile stretching across his face. “I’m not either. For the record. I haven’t ever…  nothing serious anyway, it’s always been…”

_You. It’s always been you._

This time, when their eyes met, everything that could have been said, was.

“I know,” Tweek sighed. “Me too.” His hand was cold when he laced his fingers into Craig’s own, his hair was soft against Craig’s jaw when he’d rested his head upon his shoulder; it smelled like expensive pomade and a whole lifetime’s worth of memories. “For, god, how many years? We’re pathetic, aren’t we?”

“So pathetic,” Craig smiled, and remembered every time, from ten to eighteen, he’d had the same thought he was thinking just then, with his arm around Tweek’s shoulder - _This is right. We fit._ “I’m sorry, okay? I think about it - about you - all the time, still,” he said into Tweek’s hair, voice breaking, unable to stop the words tumbling from his mouth, “You have no idea how good it is to see you again. You look amazing, so different but it’s _you_ . I’m so happy for you and…God, Tweek, _fuck,_ I’m so, so sorry. I should have told you the day after it happened, I should have _called_. I really should've gone tonight and-”

The kiss wasn’t uninhibited and passionate, there were no groping hands or forceful tongues, it didn’t cause fireworks or make the earth shake - it just _was_. It was Tweek, and it was Craig, and it was _,_ they were, they had always been, and if Craig had it his way, they would always _be._

“Wanna go back in? We all miss you, y’know?” Tweek kissed his forehead, and it felt like home.

“Okay. Let’s go.”

**Author's Note:**

> Ohhhhh I'm so, _so_ tempted to expand on this... Is there an after-bar at Token's? The next day, do they just chalk it up to being drunk on alcohol and nostalgia, or does Craig finally get the hell out of his hometown, move to Iowa and live happily ever after with Tweek? (No, because I'm not writing a long-ass fic about living in Iowa). 
> 
> Writing this gave me many feelings. Thanks all for reading!


End file.
